…because there's always a story.

September 25, 2010

And here’s one I made earlier…

(I feel a little like the chefs on TV – not enough elapsed time to finish the cake? Pull the one you baked earlier out of the second oven on set! I haven’t had any time to knit or sew for a while, so this blog post comes to you care of a top that was finished a couple of weeks ago :). )

Yosemite is a pattern in the Spring 2008 issue of Knitty, and has been on my queue ever since. I happened to have a two-toned ecru-tan 100% cotton yarn (reclaimed), which got mentally linked so much with this pattern, that I swore the pictures were in a similar colour (it’s green!).

In doing up the swatch, I knew there was going to be an issue with the lack of recovery – this yarn had no added stretchy-fibres, and was like twine to boot. In the swatch, the ribs didn’t pull in all that much. So I pulled out my old trick of “step down a size in stitch count, but do the lengths to the original size” to make up for the effectively larger gauge. Turns out that others found the top didn’t fit like the pictures if they used the sizing info given and needed to go down a size anyway.

I kept second-guessing the designer on this one. Really? Pick up one stitch per row for the placket? Isn’t that usually 3/4? Did a gauge swatch in the ribbing, measured the opening… ended up with one stitch per row :P. Got to the sleeves and found out she didn’t use short rows on the sleeve heads… decided in the end to follow the pattern as written and see how it turned out.

The only thing I did differently (besides the XS stitch count with the S lengths) was use a sewn tubular bind-off for the collar.

As I suspected, not necessarily the best design for someone who’s essentially a rectangle (there’s a reason there’s no straight-on shots: plain vertical stripes on a block…), at least not in 100% cotton with no recovery. And I do think I’d go for the short rows on the sleeve heads next time. But it’s already a jeans-and-T staple in my wardrobe, so there may very well be a next time!!